I'm having a real tough time getting this to work. I want to do it properly the first time, so that I can easily persist many different enums in the future (preferably as VARCHARs). The page pointed to most, and the one I'm struggling with currently is this:

http://www.hibernate.org/272.html

Here's my mapping snippet:



(Isn't this missing a column attribute of some kind?)

When I run hbm2java (still using the one from hibernate2--couldn't find a version for 3), the enum is left out of the class. I tried adding a column, with no success.


The other method I tried was this:

http://www.hibernate.org/265.html

The problem I faced was actually setting the value for the object...ie,

persistentObject.setFrequency( Frequency.DAILY );

did not work, because the setter wanted a FrequencyType (subclass of EnumUserType), not a Frequency enum.


That twiki could stand some cleanup on the topic of persisting enums...I'm sort of suprised this was tossed out for inclusion in Hibernate 3. All of these various EnumUserType implementations are extremely confusing. Or maybe I'm just dumb.

The reason that a column mapping isn't needed is because the value of column has a default: the value of name.

You'll need to post classes and exceptions if we're going to help debug this for you. The code on 272.html does work, or at least it did when I copied it.

I can't as of yet get a java class to be generated from the mapping described above. It generates the class with all the other properties, but the frequency is left out.

272.html doesn't mention anything about hbm2dll, so I'm betting that you have to fill in the blanks yourself. You'll definitely need to create EnumUserType.java, FrequencyUserType.java and Frequency.java yourself. I don't know if hbm2ddl handles typedefs, but if it does, then I'd set up a frequency typedef, like in the 2nd example on 272.html.